Robert Pogson

I am inspired to write this after reading some tripe on the web about GNU/Linux not making it because of inferior applications.

FIREFOX Superior in every way to IE. It would be difficult to be inferior to an application designed to bring down the house while browsing. FireFox has its share of vulnerabilities but they get fixed promptly. There are plenty of features and one of the most important are the plugins which allow extending the application itself. Everyone can have a different browser while they all call it FireFox. Sweet.

OPENOFFICE.ORG This suite of office applications was superior against the 2003 version and more so with the 2007 version from M$ with the cursed “ribbon” interface, designed to increase mileage of mice and lose newbies. A user of 2003 can switch to OpenOffice.org with very little effort. Moreover, the ability to produce PDF which we have enjoyed for years and other open standards is the icing on the cake.

LYX This one may be unfamiliar to many but it allows one to write a particular style of document while automating many tasks. For writing memos, essays and other documents it is superior to any other word-processor. It very smoothly automates citations/bibliographies and tables of contents.

XMMS Playing audio? This baby will do it all day long just like your CD player used to do it.

VLC, MPLAYER, TOTEM Video? Sure. The field is deep here.

BEAGLE Remember XP reading recursively through folders to find stuff? Beagle does it right by indexing users’ files and searching the resulting index. Smooth, fast. We had this years before Vista attempted poorly the same thing. We also have SWISH-e which is just as powerful but not as easy to use.

INKSCAPE Need some vector graphics for a logo/sign/splash screen/whatever? Inkscape has been doing the job well for years.

GIMP It does everything that Photoshop does for free except the proprietary printing colours. For people living on the web, GIMP will do the job very well. Lots of tools/scripts/extendability. Disney uses a derivative.

AUDACITY/ARDOUR Need to record/edit audio.? These will give lots of tools.

There are thousands of applications in the Debian repositories.

It goes on and on. None of us are expert with everything and do not need proprietary applications for everything. Let the pros pay thousands for their software. The 90% of us that can use our PCs with GNU/Linux to find/create/present/modify information can be happy with the applications in GNU/Linux. Some of these apps are very popular with that other OS, too. What does that say about the argument of the twits?

I guess they either are terminally stupid or deep in the pocket of M$.